A Psychocultural Approach to Korean Bureaucracy

Abstract

This study assumes that the sociopsychological heritage of political culture conditions Korean ideals, norms, and behavior by patternizing the national collective consciousness into historically recurrent modes of elite/mass relations. The Korean political culture has been and still is molded by historic residues of the heritage of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and by a high degree of ethnic homogeneity that, evidently, disposition most Koreans, especially the masses, to a submissive authoritarian political psychology that tends to legitimize the moral authority of the upper strata. The Korean political-self is acquired, we argue, through the functionally interrelated causation of five environmental dimensions: Asian setting; Oriental philosophies; homogeneous national culture; centralized, hierarchical elitist regime; and a submissive authoritarian national personality. From this dimensional causal model, we will identify characteristics of both authority and hierarchy that exemplify modal Korean political attitudes and behavior patterns(i.e., submission to authority, a desire for a powerful leadership, and the subservience of the individual to the state.) We contend that the Korean political psychology is based on the hypothetical existence of authoritarian submissive values in both the Korean elites and masses. We outline the ways in which the historic modalities of the Korean political psychology channel ideational and behavioral patterns of contemporary Korean administration and politics.